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General Loki
General Loki the velociraptor is a major antagonist in the Astrosaurs series. He is the first and most frequent recurring villain. Captain Teggs, Arx, Gipsy and Iggy have encountered him five times, in Riddle Of The Raptors, The Space Ghosts, The Claws Of Christmas, The Dreams of Dread, and Earth Attack!. Loki was killed by a meteor in Earth Attack!, making it his final appearance. Appearance General Loki was an unusually large and crafty raptor. He had orange scales, but had black stripes on his body, legs, arms, and snout. Unlike many raptors he had two dark stripes on his jaws. Loki had scars on his face and body from his years of service in the raptor army. He lost one eye at some point, wearing a black patch instead. He seemed to like tight black military uniforms. Loki had a thin, purple forked tongue. Personality General Loki was a particularly fierce and dogged opponent of both Captain Teggs and the DSS, and seemed to harbor a personal grudge against the stegosaurus. His persistent and vengeful nature caused him to go after Teggs whenever he had a chance to, even when this was self-destructive or made his plans more complex than they had to be, and he was often quick to pick a fight with [[the Sauropod|the Sauropod]] crew for no other reason but to satis .]]fy his vindictiveness or because they were in his way. He never gave up or surrendered when in a difficult situation. Loki was easy to recognize due to his many battle scars, so he sometimes used disguises to hide his true identity. He was one of the velociraptor generals and led them on many military campaigns, and was also a raptor of some importance back home on Raptos. At one point he was a personal favourite minon of the Raptor Royal, the planet's monarch. Like other raptors, Loki thrived on bloodshed and was also notably ruthless and cunning. He was apparently skilled at breaking out of prison (he had done it three times before his death). He was larger and smarter than most of the other raptors in the Jurassic Quadrant and, uniquely, did not have a rasping accent. Loki often used strange, alien technology in his schemes, indicating that he was good at using machines. Loki was very arrogant and self-possessed, and liked to talk endlessly about various titles bestowed on him by his leader (although he may have made at least some of them up himself). By the point of Earth Attack!, he wanted nothing less than worship from other carnivores. He did not seem to value or care for his raptor servants in any way and was happy to sacrifice or abandon them to benefit himself. His personality could switch in moments between cool and calm or raving, psychotic insanity, especially when things did not go his way. Biography 'Riddle of the Raptors ' Little is known about Loki's actions or his life before Teggs encountered him, but he already had a reputation as one of the most aggressive and cruel raptors in the Jurassic Quadrant, to such an extent that Teggs had already heard of him before their first encounter. However, he likely served in the raptor army, became an official, and was a powerful servant of the Raptor Royal, who lent him soldiers, monsters, and ships to use in battle. He was one of the most infamous of the raptor generals who worked under the Royal. .]] During his first appearance in Riddle Of The Raptors, Loki and many of his warriors attacked the Sauropod and kidnapped Hank and Crank, two Stegoceras athletes. Before he returned them on Planet Sixty for a ransom (20 pieces of gold, a satellite monitor, and some moss) he had his doctors hide explosives in their heads. The bombs were set to go off when they headbutted each other during the Great Dinosaur Games. Teggs went to the planet to retrieve the athletes, unsuspecting of Loki's real plan. The raptor general intended for the sabotaged stegoceras athletes to trigger the bombs, killing all of the Jurassic Quadrant's leaders in the blast and allowing the raptors' battle-fleet to attack their planets. After Arx pointed out that the raptors' ransom was unusually low, Teggs and Gipsy decided to investigate, discovering the truth from a raptor security guard on duty. With the help of the Games' pterosaur cameramen, Teggs was able to stop the bombs from exploding. After Loki's plan was ruined, he tried to blow up Teggs and Gipsy himself before [[the Sauropod|the Sauropod]] intervened and opened fire on him, blasting his ship out of orbit. His ship was then forced to crash-land on Planet Sixty, where he vowed his revenge on Teggs after a run-in with some T. rexes. Loki allowed them to eat his own crew in order to leave the planet unharmed. 'The Space Ghosts' Loki continued to pursue his quest for raptor domination, his new goal to create an invisible raptor army that could appear and disappear at will. To do this, he landed on Creepus and used a workforce of raptor miners to gather the dispium and blue marbles there, setting a trap for any intruders and burying an abandoned Maroon Miner, owned by a group of kentrosaurus miners, in the sand to hide the fact that other miners had been working on the planet. He brought a kraggle-scruncher to keep the miners themselves, now ghosts, away. While he tried to keep his activities on Creepus secret, his workers could be heard from the Camp Kentro bathrooms. Teggs, when he became a ghost himself, met Spink, the leader of the kentrosaurus. Spink showed him the raptors' mine, and Teggs was startled to see Loki barking orders to his troops, who were gathering up crates of dispium and blue marbles. When Teggs investigated Loki's raptor death ship, he was cornered by the general, who explained his plot to use the minerals to create an invisible army. Loki attempted to feed Teggs and Spink to the kraggle-scruncher, only to be interrupted when Iggy crushed the monster. The furious Loki had his miners attack the astrosaurs and Spink, but Teggs managed to force the roof to fall on top of and trap most of the raptors. Loki and most of his best soldiers got away, however. The kentrosaurus, returned to normal, attacked Loki's troops while the general fled. As he escaped Creepus in his death ship, he was shot down by Shanta and his diplodocus miners in their diplodocus ship. Plod trapped Loki under her foot as he fled the scene and he was safely locked away in jail for a time. 'The Claws of Christmas' Five books later, General Loki escaped from space prison again, rejoining his raptors. He and six of his warriors landed on Exmus in a ship disguised as a piece of space junk. They stole twenty thousand presents from Papa Claws' workshop, dumping them in deep space from a space-sleigh. Meanwhile, Loki captured Papa Claws, keeping him prisoner in a cupboard for days, forcing him to teach the raptor to impersonate him while he ordered replacement gifts from Raptos, booby-trapped with twenty thousand raptor warriors, which were shrunken using a shrink-ray taken from Papa Claws. He took Papa Claws's place, using a disguise and a voice changer. He interacted with Teggs as "Papa", only breaking from his role to hit Gipsy over the head when she discovered the shrinking ray room. He sabotaged Wrappo-Bot Six to make it attack Teggs, losing a claw in the process, and had one of his raptors, Ranpak, attack Iggy from a Christmas present that he had given the iguanodon earlier. Iggy defeated Ranpak and, suspicious, the astrosaurs investigated Papa Claws's workshop. General Loki burst in with five other raptors, and was attacked by Teggs and Gipsy. The battle was interrupted when Ranpak woke up and captured Gipsy. Loki presented Papa Claws as a hostage and described his plan to unleash his raptor army on the Vegetarian Sector on Christmas Day. When Loki decided to eat his prisoners, Iggy interrupted, punching him and making him release Papa Claws. Gipsy escaped from Ranpak as Arx, Nickel, and Hans joined the fight. The raptors were defeated, but Loki got away, escaping into space in a stolen space-sleigh with his booby-trapped gifts. Teggs and Iggy used another space-sleigh to chase him. Loki used built-in lasers to herd the astrosaurs' sleigh into his invasion fleet of raptor death ships. The death ships were dispersed by pursuit probes, enraging Loki, who attacked Teggs and Iggy. He crashed into their ship and lost control, landing on Stinkoss. Loki and his raptors were later arrested by Admiral Rosso and the general was returned to jail. 'The Dreams of Dread ' Loki escaped from prison again four books later in The Dreams of Dread, with the help of the Raptor Royal and another kraggle-scruncher. The Sauropod crew was sent after him, but the raptor general trapped them on their own ship and set a pack of dream-creatures on them by using special dream meteors from Raptos. He planned to steal the Sauropod and use it to deposit dream meteors all over the Vegetarian Sector, plaguing its people with hideous living nightmares and leaving it open to a raptor invasion. He used anti-gravity boots and crimson smoke to give himself a spooky appearance and used teleporters to make himself and the dream-creatures appear and disappear, psychologically tormenting Teggs. Loki also kidnapped every last pterosaur on the ship so that they could fly it for him later. He captured the ship's Alarm Pterosaur, threatening to destroy her if the Sauropod crew damaged the engines, but Teggs had had enough of Loki's mind games and physically attacked the evil raptor, and all three vanished. Teggs finally confonted Loki outside on the planet of Mallakar, Loki encased in a battle-spacesuit designed for his kraggle-scruncher. Sprite, who was another of Loki's captives, escaped when the general abducted the alarm pterosaur and signalled to Teggs, telling him to keep Loki busy. The raptor used the spacesuit to try and crush Teggs while he gloated. He pulled out lasers to finish the stegosaurus off, but the dimorphodon and alarm pterosaur dropped rocks on his suit, keeping Loki distracted. Teggs shattered the cockpit, broke the suit's controls and went for Loki. Loki was unfazed and placed frayed wires on Teggs in an attempt to electrocute him. However, back on the Sauropod, the dimorphodon smashed the dream meteor on their ship while the raptor gazed on in horror, allowing Teggs to wriggle free. Loki desperately fiddled with his armoured spacesuit's controls in an attempt to get them to work, but Sprite dropped a rock on the raptor's head and knocked him out. After the incident on Mallakar, the DSS sent Loki back to space prison. 'Earth Attack!' Loki, in his final and most ambitious plot, took advantage of his position next to fellow prisoner Zindi Bent, a plesiosaur inventor who was falsely accused of working for the Doom-Flipper Gang. Loki bit one of his guards, who took him to Governor Bunwinkle the diplodocus for punishment. Loki overpowered Bunwinkle, who was weakened by his use of Zindi's time machine, threatened to have his grandmother eaten if he warned the other guards, and called in an assault squad of his raptors. Loki confronted the astrosaurs with a dozen raptor warriors, emerging from a Bunwinkle disguise. While the astrosaurs and Admiral Rosso defeated the raptors, Loki used gas to put them to sleep, stole Zindi's time machine, and escaped through a space tunnel in a private raptor death-flyer while the DSS arrested his raptors in the Vegmeat Zone. Loki fled to the distant past, to Earth, where he met the carnivore king there, King Rokol the spinosaurus. Promising Rokol domination and new weapons, Loki, calling himself the "Great Star Raptor", was venerated by Rokol and the other carnivores, giving them laser-cannons to attack the herbivorous dinosaurs' ships with and ensure carnivore rule of the Earth. However, Teggs and some helpers from the past, his ancestors Zac and Gazell, managed to destroy the weapons through their own technology and expose Loki as a fake. Enraged by the raptor's trickery, Rokol abandoned Loki and made peace with the herbivores before leaving Earth forever with his people. Loki didn't give up on his plans, however, secretly hiding bombs in garga-weeds that were taken on board the Soar-a-Saurus in an attempt to destroy all herbivorous dinosaurs before they made it to the Jurassic Quadrant. Teggs managed to take the general prisoner, intending to force him to find and disarm the weapons, but Loki wriggled free and attacked him. Arx managed to change the settings of Shuttle Alpha's magnets to attract mega-metal, drawing away the bombs from the Soar-a-Saurus and foiling Loki's plan. The enraged velociraptor general cursed the astrosaurs in a tantrum, but was struck by two crates from the herbivore escape vessel. When the crates were dragged into an oncoming meteor, General Loki was killed instantly in the ensuing explosion. Teggs reacted to the death of his archenemy with shock and relief, considering Loki's end terrible but appropriate. Trivia *In Revenge of the FANG, Attila planned to make a dino-droid copy of General Loki, but, due to time and a shortage of necessary materials, decided to use King Albu, another early villain, instead. *General Loki is a member of the species Velociraptor mongoliensis. .]] *General Loki liked to rant about his many titles, and is usually interrupted by Teggs before he can finish as a running gag in the series. He mentions different dinosaurs in his speech depending on the book, often referring to encounters with Teggs on different planets. *General Loki's name has two possible origins. It could be a corruption of the "loci" part of his species name, Velociraptor. However, it is more likely that General Loki is named after the Norse god of mischief, Loki. His first name, Gremlin, comes from gremlins, imaginary creatures that pestered British pilots during World War II by sabotaging their planes. *In Riddle of the Raptors and The Space Ghosts, General Loki wears various types of black uniforms, but in The Claws of Christmas and The Dreams of Dread, Loki doesn't wear any clothes at all. He has his uniform again in Earth Attack!, but not on the book's cover. *Loki is the first recurring villain in the series to die. Category:Astrosaurs Category:Villains Category:Raptors Category:AOTMs Category:Carnivores Category:Deceased characters